See pictures as a slide show

Applies to these editions of Windows Vista

Home Premium

Ultimate

You can view your pictures and videos as a full-screen slide show. You can choose from among a number of themes that present your pictures in unique ways. You can also choose which pictures you want to appear in your slide show, and control the speed at which your slide show plays.

Open Windows Photo Gallery by clicking the Start button , clicking All Programs, and then clicking Windows Photo Gallery.

Click the pictures you want to display in the slide show.

To select more than one picture, hold down the CTRL key while you click the pictures you want. To include all of your pictures in the slide show, don't click any pictures.

Click the Slide Show button at the bottom of Photo Gallery to start the slide show.

Tip

If you don't select any pictures, or if you only select one picture, the slide show will play all of the pictures in the current view of Photo Gallery.

Slide shows run automatically, so you do not need to use the mouse or keyboard to move from one picture to the next. However, you can take over the controls of the slide show at any time. The slide show controls are located at the bottom of the screen and will disappear if you do not touch the mouse or keyboard while the slide show runs. To make the controls reappear, move the mouse. This is what the controls look like:

The slide show controls

If you don’t see these controls, your slide show is running in Basic mode. In Basic mode, you can’t play videos or change themes, but you can control other aspects of the slide show. Right-click the slide show to display a menu with control options. For information about how to avoid Basic mode and see the slide show controls, see "Improve your slide show’s visuals" later in this topic.

You can apply any of several themes to your slide shows to display the pictures in different ways. Some themes fill the screen with one picture at a time, while other themes arrange several pictures on the screen at once. You can change themes at any time while a slide show plays, and whatever theme you last chose will be applied to your slide show the next time your start it.

Tip

Most themes show both pictures and videos, but the Classic theme shows only pictures.

In order to see your slide show with high-quality visuals (including videos, themes, and transitions), you need to have a subscore of 3.0 for the Graphics category in the Windows Experience Index. Some themes also require your computer’s graphics card to have a feature called Vertex Shader 2.0. To take advantage of all slide show capabilities, you might need to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card. For more information, see Ways to improve your computer's performance.